War
by Wolfish Oro
Summary: She won the battle this year, but it's part of an on-going war. Humor! Read it! It's not crackfic! Mild cussing! Insanity! Y'all know what to expect from me by now, I mean, really...


March thirty-first was always a busy night for Sarah. It mattered not what day of the week it was, nor what year; every year, on March thirty-first, Sarah crept into the Labyrinth to wreck havoc.

This year, she decided to celebrate the Underground calendar's March thirty-first, instead of the Aboveground calendar's; she hoped, by using such trickery, she would finally, _finally _get that one-up on Jareth. Every single year, she pulled off the most spectacular prank… only to return home to find Goblins high on laundry detergent, or mirrors that snuck legs out their glass surface and tripped passer-bys, or that one memorable time in college when Sarah had found all the words in her textbook had re-ordered themselves to read upside down, backwards, AND scrambled.

This year, she decided, would be different. Sarah shifted the pack so it was more securely slung across her torso before kicking back the kickstand on her ten-speed and pedaling into the Labyrinth.

* * *

Jareth watched as Sarah leaned into a hairpin turn in the hedge-maze. She thought she was so cunning; she didn't know that, ever since the first year she started this war, he watched her every March thirty-first, on every calendar he could think of.

The Goblin King smirked as he faded out of the Underground and into the Aboveground. It was mid-winter here, which opened up more possibilities than spring. Jareth twirled the crystal scrying globe in just such a way; it floated at eyelevel two paces to his right. With his make-shift security camera in place, he started at the Goblin's craft with a blank canvas: mischief in an empty apartment.

* * *

Sarah had to force back the urge to whistle as she worked. She wasn't sure if Jareth knew where she was, but she certainly didn't want him to know if he didn't already. The first place she set to her art—yes, _her_ art, through the years, the Goblins had taught her their chief craft until her skills matched, or almost matched, the King's skill—was the King's study. She very carefully set up the illusion on the door; she wished she could set up a camera to capture the four times Jareth would run into the be-spelled door. Sarah reached out and touched the surface of the door through the glamour—it looked open now, but it was truly closed. The glamour was wired to shuffle how it looked every time it shut. _Perfect,_ Sarah thought.

Next, the desk. It really was too bad that she'd have to mar the beautiful mahogany desk, but this was _war_, and sacrifices had to be made. So Sarah extracted her prank-king tools from a pocket in her messenger's bag and started rooting carefully through the desk's drawers. Sarah collected every pen, pencil, quill, inkwell, and every other writing device Jareth had and started to replace the ink. The spell was simple enough, but she needed to send the excess ink and graphite somewhere… Sarah grinned maliciously as she tied off the removal spell; Jareth would have no way of knowing where, exactly, that ink went until he—she laughed—encountered it. It took two more spells to refill the various and sundry writing utensils with either invisible ink or neon pink glitter ink. Several of them she magicked to start off looking like black ink that swiftly faded into invisible ink that would write only insults. Sarah sealed the 

desk with a final spell to prevent Jareth from summoning new pens and pencils beyond the reach of her prank.

Sarah wandered down to the kitchens; she had two or three more things to set up before she snuck up to Jareth's rooms to pass through the mirror in his sitting room. It wasn't necessary to use that particular mirror, but it was one of the few mirrors that knew not to tell Jareth when she decided to pop in unannounced.

Mirrors, Sarah had found, were loud mouths.

* * *

Jareth started with tinkering.

It was something Goblin Kings were required to be good at, and since the invention of electric lighting, Jareth had gotten damn good at tinkering with mechanized objects. Toasters, blenders, lights, microwaves, coffeepots…

Coffeepots.

Sarah, he knew, loved coffee. She drank it with a disgusting amount of sugar and a hell of a lot of milk, and she drank it to stay awake—and to stay alert—whenever she thought he might be up to mischief.

_Now would be an excellent time to take advantage of that knowledge_, Jareth mused. He pulled out the materials for the coffee—beans, filter, coffeepot, measuring cups—and stared down at them, considering the multitudes of possibilities. He drew a crystal from the air and crushed it over the coffee beans, and then over the coffee pot. With those tasks completed, he replaced everything—"_The mark of a true ninja,"_ Sarah always said, "_is putting the cap back on the toothpaste."_— before he stalked off to Sarah's hidey-hole.

In the past nine years—_ten this October; my, how time does fly,_ he snorted—one of the unwritten rules of this "war" was "Thou shalt not prank the safe-bases." _It's high time to change that_, Jareth thought with a rather wicked grin.

The lock on the door didn't slow him at all, nor did the wards Sarah had set. How could they stop him? It wasn't a matter of power so much as a matter of intention—Sarah was his equal in most magicks, but the wards were designed to keep out thieves and thugs, not impish Goblin Kings. So Jareth entered the room with little difficulty and cast a thoughtful eye about the place. The security-crystal pulsed light twice in warning, and Jareth looked over at it in time to see Sarah ward the doors in the Castle kitchens against scrying spells.

_That does NOT bode well for my Castle. Don't Goblins cook with explosives?_

Hurried now, he starts to weave the spells throughout the room—the light bulbs in the room's only lamp will, at the most inconvenient time, flicker and turn orange. The gravity in the room was disproportional to the room itself, he decided, so he shifted it, just a little, really, a tad to the left of where it had been. And then, there was that one thing that had bothered him whenever he came over to visit…

All in all, not too much was done this year. But he had to get back to the Castle—deities only knew what Sarah had done under the cover of that ward.

Setting up what he was fairly sure would be his last retaliation spell—and the only one that would last longer than twelve, thirteen, or twenty-four hours—, Jareth skulked back to Sarah's mirror… And found an opportunity to good to pass up.

_One quick spell and I'm done_, Jareth thought. Unfortunately, he miscalculated the time he needed to cast the spell; he ended up staying twelve minutes and fifty-nine seconds longer than he planned.

* * *

Sarah had been creeping through the mirror when she caught sight of them. They were just _there_, and really, who could have passed up such an opportunity? It would only take her only thirty seconds to booby-trap them, but after spending the last fourteen minutes and one second teaching the Goblins how to pull off their end of the prank…

_What the hell_, Sarah thought, _why not? I'll just be quick about it._

In fact, she just barely managed to put her tools back in her bag when the first ripples started in the mirror.

_Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,_ the words repeated in Sarah's head as a mantra, but she had little time to dwell on them. She jumped into the mirror, pulling her bike through as she went, and asked the mirror to hide her from Jareth. When she stepped out through her mirror, she turned and thanked both mirrors.

"I wouldn't be thanking them, if I were you," Jareth's voice rang out. Sarah whirled around, searching through the gloom of the apartment to see where he was.

"After all, they let Jareth in," the voice continued.

"I thought you stopped referring to yourself in third person eight years ago," Sarah mumbled.

"I am not referring to myself, Sarah. Jareth is Jareth and I am me." The voice was much closer; Sarah turned her head to see… her Goblin King action-figure. He was dressed differently, now, no longer in the steal-the-kids clothes but in full ballroom regalia. He was lounging in a teacup, sitting in it quite happily, and worst of all, he was _talking_.

"Well, if he's Jareth, who are you?"

"A voice of reason," the action-figure intoned solemnly. When Sarah didn't laugh, he sighed. "You may call me Jay, I suppose." Sarah shook her head as she started making her coffee. Jay started to say something, thought better of it, and watched as Sarah sipped her coffee—only to spit it out immediately.

"Ugh! What in Hell's name—"

"Jareth. Duh," Jay drawled from his perch on the counter. He stood and turned into a miniature owl, flew across the room and landed on Sarah's shoulder. Once there, he turned back into a mini Goblin King. "You might not want to drink the coffee today. I think he put Goblingibbet in it. It's really not harmful, but it tastes horrible and is a mild laxative to most Abovegrounders."

Sarah paled and poured out her coffee. When she went to empty the filter in the coffeepot, it growled at her.

"I would leave that alone, too," Jay added helpfully.

"You couldn't have said something sooner?" Sarah snapped. Jay grinned and shook his head. "Whatever. I'll just go hide out with a book, then…" Jay said nothing, so Sarah opened the door to her hidey-hole.

"Oh, hell, no…" she gasped. Everything had shifted one wall over. The bookcases were on the ceiling and floor, the window-seat was not vertical (even if it did seem slightly crooked), and her chair was on the left wall. "That's against the _rules!_" Sarah managed to spit. Jay laughed.

"And your trick with the Goblins wasn't? Don't worry, once you step in, you'll be reoriented, too."

"But I won't be able to reach my books!"

"Sure you will—you'll be on that wall, so you can reach them, same as always. Er, am I hearing things, or—"

The slippers came flying out of nowhere. The monster-face plushies started nipping at Sarah's heels, growling at Jay, attacking the lamp—the lamp! Sarah thunked her head against the doorframe. Her lamp was glowing orange. It had a green lampshade, and the colors clashed horribly. As the slippers bit her toes again, Sarah took comfort in the only thing she could: she knew what Jareth would be subjected to.

* * *

_Another year, another victory,_ Jareth smirked. He had only to run up to his office and write a quick note to the Faerie Queen before he could relax—all day! A whole day off... Jareth dressed quickly, moved quickly through the halls, and finding the door to his study open, he quickly ran into it. Literally.

Shaking his head to clear away the disorientation, Jareth rushed to his desk to jot down the note… and frowned when pen after pen after pencil after pen seemed empty of ink and jerky in its writing. He finally found one that worked, only to have it turn pink. With a sigh, he gave up and used an obnoxiously pink glitter ink to write the Faerie Queen's note—and stared in horror as he realized the pen wrote only obscenities. In disgust, he threw the pens away and summoned a Pixie to send a verbal message.

He ran into the door again on his way out of the office, cussed his way down to the kitchens, and foraged for food while subtly inspecting the kitchens for scorch marks that might have been influenced by the presence of a certain mortal woman. Having found only normal Goblin explosion marks, Jareth made his way to his throne.

As soon as he sat down, the Goblins started chittering excitedly. It was the only warning Jareth received before a kazoo sounded and the Goblins, as one (horribly off-key) voice, started singing.

"_I KNOW A SONG THAT GETS ON EVERYBODY'S NERVES, EVERYBODY'S NERVES, EVERYBODY'S NERVES! I KNOW A SONG THAT GETS ON EVERYBODY'S NERVES, AND THIS IS HOW IT GOES (bah-buhb-bum) I KNOW A SONG—"_

Jareth twitched on his throne, but decided to ignore them. They'd forget about the damn song in a minute or two. He twitched again, and realized his leg itched. No… both legs itched. Actually, anything covered by his pants…

"You are a cruel, cruel woman, Sarah Williams!" Jareth roared three hours later. The itching powder had rubbed into his skin, all the other doors in the Castle decided they liked slamming the man who'd slammed them for so long, and the Goblins were _still_ singing.

* * *

Yes, this one year—just this one year, Sarah had the satisfaction of winning the battle, even if she had not yet won the war.

* * *

Oro: Happy April Fool's Day! I own Labyrinth! APRIL FOOLS! (sobs)


End file.
